


Caught in Bad Metaphor Hell

by Antarctic_Echoes



Series: Luciferian Fics (One shots) [25]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Crack, F/M, Humor, I'm Sorry, Really Bad Metaphors, bad metaphor challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 22:46:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10397868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antarctic_Echoes/pseuds/Antarctic_Echoes
Summary: Lucifer finds himself caught in really REALLY bad metaphor hell and runs to Chloe to see if she can help him.  This is for the bad metaphor challenge.Takes place after S2x08.One shot.I'm sorry.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ScooterThyme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScooterThyme/gifts), [titC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/titC/gifts), [moonatoms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonatoms/gifts).



> This is for the bad metaphor challenge. I found this website:  
> http://mistupid.com/people/page027.htm  
> and I wanted to see how many of these bad metaphors I could weave into a coherent story. Most of the good bad metaphors came from this site. One excellent one came from my wonderful beta, ScooterThyme, and the really bad (and not in a good way) metaphors are from me.... This was meant to be humorous so please don't read this with any expectations of War and Peace, hahaha! Take it with a grain of salt that was evaporated from a ton of sea water from the Arctic Circle! :D
> 
> A big, huge thank you to my excellent beta, ScooterThyme who had to beta this monstrosity and thank you for your help!
> 
> Thank you to titC for suggesting that I take that page of bad metaphors and turn it into a challenge!
> 
> Than you to moonatoms for encouraging me to post this awful thing and tag it "crack." It IS crack! Hahaha!
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: Lucifer Morningstar, Chloe Decker, Ella Lopez and Dan Espinoza are owned by Vertigo Comics, DC Comics, Neil Gaiman, Mike Carey, and everyone else involved with the Lucifer TV show and comic books. I own nothing and make no money on this. I merely am borrowing the characters for... uh... writing practice.

 

 

The first thing that caught Lucifer Morningstar’s attention was the storm.  The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play, and the hailstones that fell on his balcony leaped from the tiles just like maggots when fried in hot grease.

His brows furrowed as he considered his thoughts.  Since when did hail leap like maggots fried in hot grease?  He had never even  _ seen _ maggots fried in hot grease.  Something was wrong.  Confused thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free fabric softener.  His mind was usually like a steel trap, but now it seemed that the trap had been left out so long that it had rusted shut.

“Lucifer?”

A beautiful woman, clad only in a towel, came out of his bedroom.  He blinked.  What was her name again?  Elsie... that was right.  The night before, she had caught his eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever one banged the door open again.  He had approached her and, sure enough, she had been as easy as the “TV Guide” crossword.

Goodness, what was he thinking?!

“I’m surprised you’re still here,” he managed to say.

She laughed -- a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog made just before it threw up.  Walking right up like a centipede with ninety-eight missing legs, Elsie planted herself in front of him.  She had a hungry look, the kind one got from not eating for a while, and her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

“Oh, Lucifer, take me!” she said as her breasts heaved like a college freshman on dollar-a-beer night.

Panic filled him -- pure unadulterated panic.  Something was terribly, terribly wrong!  He needed help!

The detective!  Surely she would be able to cure him of this strange malady he found himself hip-deep in...?  The bad metaphors were pulling him down like a triceratops caught in a tar pit that stank of bat guano.

Before Elsie could stop him, he ran to the elevator and hit the call button repeatedly like a woodpecker pecking on a petrified tree.  Luckily he had dressed when he had awoken, so there wasn’t the awkward experience of getting his clothes on and spending any more time with Elsie than necessary.  Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

Bloody hell, what was  _ wrong _ with him?!

Once the car arrived, he threw himself into the elevator like a cook tossing a bucket of dirty water down the drain, and quickly went to ground level.  The valets brought up his Corvette and he roared onto the street, not even bothering to put the top up.  Luckily the hail had turned into rain, which wasn’t so bad.  The drizzle made his hair glisten like nose hair after a sneeze.

“This is you, isn’t it, Dad?” he yelled up at the ominous thunderclouds overhead that looked as dark as a parent’s face when their child ate the birthday cake before the party.  “Bloody hell, stop this!”

There was no answer from the gloomy sky above.

 

 

________________________________________

 

 

“Detective!”  Lucifer rushed into the precinct and down the stairs, looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.  “You have to help me!”

Chloe looked up as he came running up to her desk.  He didn’t know what to say to her.  How could he describe the wrongness that was permeating the air like a bad stench from a dead skunk that had been run over several times?  There were no words, so he stood there in front of her, as mute as a sloth trying to cross several lanes of traffic on the freeway.  Surely she wasn’t affected, though?  She was immune to his charms like a stubborn cancer cell was to regular drugs, after all.  He was sure she would be able to fix his problem -- she had to!

“Hey,” she said, then squinted at him.  “You know, I never noticed this, but you’re as tall as a six foot three inch tree.”

Lucifer blinked.   _ What? _

“Anyway, I’m glad you’re here,” she said as she opened a file.  “Dan and I have been working a case.  I tried to call you yesterday morning, but you weren’t answering your phone.”

“You... did?  My phone didn’t ring.  It must have died like Julius Caesar getting mauled by a horde of angry honey badgers.”  He slammed his hand over his mouth, horrified.  Bloody hell,  _ what _ did he just say?!

Chloe didn’t even blink.  “I see.  Well, sit down.  Let me tell you about this case.”

“Right.”  He slowly lowered himself into the chair across from her, wondering why she hadn’t noticed his strange statement.

“Dan and I responded to reports of a double homicide at the Sunset Tower Hotel on Sunset Boulevard -- a John McMurphy and Mary Anderson were killed there.  Now from what we discovered, McMurphy and Anderson had never met.  They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.”

Lucifer looked up sharply.  “What?!”

Chloe tilted her head, looking as puzzled as Mister Spock studying a malfunctioning tricorder.  “What?”

For a long moment he stared at her like a talking kangaroo stared at one that didn’t.  “What did you just say?”

“McMurphy and Anderson had never met.”

“Nay, after that --”

Chloe’s eyes narrowed.  “Are you high?”

“What?  Of course not!”  Lucifer fumed for a moment like a house being treated for termites.

She gave him an odd glance.  “You’re acting weirder than normal.”  Turning her attention back to the file in front of her, she continued.  “Now then, Anderson lived in Monrovia, a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth --”

_ “What?!” _

Chloe slapped the file shut and glared at him, her eyes spitting as much fire as an exploding volcano.   _ “What _ is going on with you?”

For once the sight of her in all her glorious anger did not fill him with lust -- there were just too many bad metaphors in the air.  He was afraid to think of the metaphors that would rack his brain if he started thinking of laying her down on the table and having sex with her like a --

No.  Lucifer slammed the door on his thoughts as forcefully as a wolverine’s teeth clamped down on the neck of a caribou, and instead rubbed his forehead.  “I... I don’t know.”

Her face filled with concern -- her face that was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.  Her worried eyes were like limpid pools, only the pH cleanser had been forgotten to be added.  “Did you want to pass on this case?”

The fallen angel fell as silent as a river otter being stalked by a jaguar who ended up eating an alligator, and rubbed his forehead.  Was he losing his mind?  Perhaps Dad was trying to force him back to Hell by making everyone and everything as crazy as a penguin on crack cocaine....

Taking a deep breath, he finally spoke.  “No.  Just... tell me about the case.”

Chloe gave him an odd look.  “Okay.”  Opening the file back up, she said, “We discovered that McMurphy was as lame as a duck.  Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame.  Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.”

Lucifer blinked.  “A... land mine.”

Glancing up, she nodded.  “Uh huh.  Ducks can go lame if they step on a land mine -- well, if they aren’t blown to smithereens first, of course.”

“Of... course.”

“McMurphy lived in a small house in Los Feliz.  According to neighbors, he was quite upset after finding out that his wife had been cheating on him.  We suspect that the revelation that his marriage of thirty years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.”

Lucifer’s head was beginning to hurt.  “Right.”

“For some reason, Anderson and McMurphy met each other at the Sunset Tower Hotel.  There were reports of shots ringing out, as shots are wont to do.  When we got there, the hotel door had been forced, as forced as the dialogue during the interview portions of ‘Jeopardy!’  Anderson had been shot to death, while McMurphy had fallen twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup --”

He stared at her with disbelieving eyes.  “A... Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup...?”

Chloe nodded.  “Yes, and not the good kind either -- the type that has too much sodium --”

“Detective, please stop.”  The fallen angel rubbed his face with both hands.  “Please.”

She cocked her head at him.  “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t find... our discussion slightly disturbing?”

“How so?”

“You just described a man falling off of a building as a garbage bag filled with sodium-laden soup.  You don’t find this a bit... odd?”

Her brows furrowed like a plow scraping into lush farmland.  “I always describe people hitting pavement like that.  Everyone does -- it’s  an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.”

Lucifer squeezed the bridge of his nose.  Obviously the detective was infected with the same malady as he was, except she didn’t seem to realize it.

“Anyway, the odd thing is that McMurphy was stabbed.”

His eyes popped open like bubbles bursting in a pan of soapy dishwater.  “I thought you said he had thrown himself off the building.”

“I did.  It appears that he broke into Anderson’s hotel room.  Anderson stabbed him with a knife, and then he shot her before throwing himself off of the balcony like a man tossing a bowling ball out the window as if it was a bird, only it doesn’t fly.”

“Detective....”  He tugged at the back of his neck.  “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

She gave him a confused look.  “What doesn’t?”

“The simile about the bowling ball --”

Just then, Dan and Ella both came rushing up to the pair.

Ella spoke first.  “I have information on the knife that stabbed McMurphy.  It was a non-serrated kitchen knife, and as sharp as the tone used by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Representative Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.”

Chloe swallowed that information like a sperm whale eating a squid.  “What would a person staying in a hotel be doing with a kitchen knife?”

“I found out that the person McMurphy’s wife was having an affair with was Mary Anderson!” Dan cried like a crow with a frog stuck in its throat, with little webbed feet hanging out of its beak.

Chloe stood decisively like a commander on top of a submarine.  “Let’s go talk to the wife, Lucifer!”

 

 

________________________________________

 

 

McMurphy’s wife, Ann, resembled an old dishrag that had seen one too many washings.  Her complexion was as pale as hospital white walls, and the bags under her eyes were big enough to carry groceries in.  Lucifer studied her and reflected that her life must have been harder than aggregated diamond nanorods.

“Where were you yesterday?” Chloe asked as she and Lucifer took a seat on the couch of the living room, across from Ann.

The woman shrugged.  “At home.”

“Can anyone confirm your whereabouts?”

“Not really.”

“Do you know Mary Anderson?”

“Maybe.”

“We have it on good authority that you were having an affair with her.”

“Maybe.”

As Lucifer turned to his partner, his voice took on a tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.  “Detective, this is getting us nowhere -- it’s as if we’re riding an ant walking in a tiny, tiny,  _ tiny _ circle.”  Rising to his feet like a tidal wave getting ready to wipe out the California coast, the fallen angel approached the woman and flexed his charm.  “Right.  Tell me, what is it you desire, more than anything in this world?”

The woman blinked at him.  “Nothing.”

He blinked. “Nothing?”  He had never gotten that response before.

“I have everything I’ve been wanting for a long time.”

Thinking hard for a moment, Lucifer asked, “Well... what is it you desired yesterday?”

Ann stared at him.  “I... wanted my husband and lover both dead.”

The fallen angel’s face lit up like a flashlight that put out ninety-thousand lumens.  “I see!  And why is that?  Come on, you can tell me.”

“My husband was horribly abusive, so I ran off with Mary as an escape.  She had offered to help me be free, but later she wanted to blackmail me.  So I called Mary and told her that I’d bring the cash she wanted to the Sunset Towers Hotel, and then arranged for my husband to also meet me there.  When they both arrived, I went up and killed them both.”

“Very ingenious of you,” Lucifer said as Chloe stood and got her handcuffs out.

“I staged it so that it looked like a murder suicide... and now I have it all,” Ann said, then frowned, looking as crushed as corn flakes at the very bottom of a cereal box.  “Except I’m not free now, am I?”

“Sadly, no,” Chloe said as she handcuffed the woman and called dispatch.

 

 

________________________________________

 

 

“Well, Lucifer, thanks to you, we have our killer,” Chloe said to him outside of the house as they watched the uniformed officers take Ann away.  She beamed at him.  “You did good.”

His heart skipped a beat at her praise and he preened like a proud peacock strutting around a park and waving his tail feathers in the air.  That simile, though, had his self-admiration grinding to a halt like a pepper mill held by a tired and over-worked waiter in a restaurant not nearly as fancy as its name implied.  Lucifer turned to his partner.  “Right.  Now we can focus on  _ my _ problem.”

Her eyebrows rose like a helium balloon released from the chubby hand of a child.  “Your problem?”

He nodded.  “Yes.”

“And what is your problem?”

He frowned as he struggled with the million metaphors pounding his brain.  “Detective, doesn’t everything seem a little... off to you?  I mean... you said I’m as tall as a six foot three inch tree.”

Chloe’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement like a cat trying to figure out how to get down from a towering tree.  “But you  _ are _ as tall as a six foot three inch tree.”

“Well, yes, but....”  He flung up his arms in frustration.  “Goodness sakes, Detective, that isn’t how you should be describing me!”

“But that’s how I always describe you.”  For a long moment Chloe studied him like an iguana having a staring contest with a komodo dragon.  “What the hell is wrong with you today?”

Lucifer chewed his lower lip.  “I... I don’t know.  I’m not feeling quite... myself today.”

Looking as worried as a cuddly puppy that had lost sight of its mother, Chloe took a hold of his shoulders and stared into his eyes.  “What’s wrong?  Is there anything I can do to help?”

Warmth shot through him like volcanic lava covering Pompeii.  “I... I don’t know, Detective.  Something’s not... right.  I can’t explain it.”

“Do you need to visit Doctor Martin?”

“I... I suppose so --”  Lucifer squeezed his eyes shut.

“You’re worrying me,” she said.  “Look, you’re my partner, and I... I care about you.  I can take care of the paperwork.  Why don’t you go home and rest?”

Her words warmed his heart even as his mind immediately rejected her suggestion.  Go home?  And leave her side?  He couldn’t bear to be away from her.  Only now in this crazy bad metaphor world did he realize that she had grown on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.  No, that wasn’t right -- he had actually fallen for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.  He was so deeply in love that when she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Wait.  He... he  _ loved _ her?  The revelation hit him like a ton of bricks that were the color of a Crayola brick red crayon, making his head spin wildly.  The fallen angel felt like he was about to faint like Clarissa in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel of the same name, except his name wasn’t Clarissa.

“What -- what’s happening?” he cried.  As if he had been too long on the teacups ride at Disneyland, the world whirled around him, tilting this way and that.  He heard Chloe’s voice calling out to him as he toppled like a giant Sequoia falling in the middle of a dense, quiet forest, and the world faded to black.

 

 

________________________________________

 

 

When Lucifer opened his eyes, he found himself in his bedroom.  For a moment he lay there, disoriented.  Hadn’t he just been in Los Feliz, with Chloe?  Had she somehow brought him back to his penthouse?  And if she had, where was she now?

He lay still for a moment, letting his thoughts wash over him as he waited for a bad metaphor to suddenly explode in his brain.  He waited... and waited.  Nothing.  Was he free from his strange malady?

The sound of his phone disturbed his thoughts.  Reaching over, he picked up his device and saw that it was his partner.  His voice was tremulous as he answered.  “D-Detective?”

“Lucifer!  It’s about time you picked up.”  Her voice crackled over the line.  “I’ve been trying to call you.”

“You have?”

“We have a case.  Meet me at the Sunset Towers Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.  There’s been a double homicide.”

“Right.  Detective --”  He hesitated for a moment.  “How... how would you describe my height?”

“Excuse me?”

“Just... please.  Tell me.”

“You’re six foot three.  Why?”

“I’m not as tall as a... six foot three inch tree?”

There was a long pause before her annoyed voice came on the line.  “Are you high?  What the hell are you talking about?”

Lucifer let out a deep breath.  Dream.  It had been a dream!  Well, more like a nightmare....

But then he realized that his dream had been about the case she was calling him about.  Lucifer’s heart stuttered before thumping out a frantic beat.  Had Dad been playing a terrible trick on him?  Or had he been... somewhere else?  Like the Twilight Zone?

He scoffed.  Nonsense.  There was no such thing!

“Right.  Never mind.  I’ll be there.”  Replacing the phone on his nightstand, he thought of his partner’s face.  Her eyes of aqua blue flashed in his mind, and thankfully his brain did not associate it with limpid pools missing the pH cleanser.  Breathing a sigh of relief, he pulled himself out of bed.  The dream was slowly fading away, as if it had never been.

There had been something at the end of the dream, though -- something important that he had discovered.  Something he needed to remember....  But a gossamer veil had been pulled over his memories, and he could no longer recall what it had been about.  As he dressed, the last vestiges of his dream dissipated.  Whistling a carefree tune, he left his penthouse, eager to see his partner and start on the new case.

 

 


End file.
